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[Jay]

 

[Jay]

It began with a handful of students waving red flags in a cold, cobblestone square nearly 2,000 kilometers from home. Then came the chants, soft at first, then defiantly clear: “The people want the fall of the regime!” What might have once sounded like the slogan of another era was, on this spring morning in Kraków, the beginning of something new ,and for Türkiye’s ruling Communist regime, perhaps something deeply unsettling.

Over the past week, Turkish students based in Poland have emerged as an unexpected vanguard of dissent. At the Voices for Liberty: Kraków Democracy Forum, an annual gathering of scholars, civil society leaders, and activists, they did more than attend. They protested. And in doing so, they launched the first organized opposition movement in exile aimed squarely at the Communist authorities in Ankara.

This matters. Not just because the chants echoed in a city known for resistance, but because Poland is home to a significant Turkish diaspora, some 25,000 people, including at least 5,000 students. For years, they have kept a low profile. That changed last Thursday, when students from universities in Warsaw, Kraków, and Wrocław took to the forum’s main square, carrying the flag of the CHP, the Republican People’s Party, long regarded as the spiritual home of Kemalism.

The symbolism was unmistakable. The CHP, though neutered at home under years of authoritarian consolidation, still evokes the memory of a secular, republican Türkiye, a country increasingly unrecognizable to many of its exiled youth. That these protests erupted not in Berlin or Brussels, but in the heart of monarchial Poland, signals something Ankara can no longer ignore: the regime is being challenged not only at home but in the minds of its youngest, most global citizens abroad.

For Türkiye’s rulers, dissent among the diaspora has long been dismissed as fringe, a Western-educated irritant with little traction. But now, the equation is shifting. Students interviewed by the Post spoke not of nostalgia but of reform, representation, and revolt. “We grew up under surveillance,” one student from Izmir told me. “We know what silence costs. This is the first place we’ve truly felt free to speak. And so we must.”

The Voices for Liberty Forum became, perhaps unintentionally, a kind of incubator for their cause. Originally conceived as a platform to renew civic culture within Poland’s constitutional monarchy, it became the unlikely stage for Türkiye’s democratic exiles to find one another. Organizers of the forum welcomed their presence and their passion. One Polish speaker told me, “Democracy needs courage. And courage often starts with the students.”

There’s a lesson here for Western observers too often lulled into geopolitical fatalism: Authoritarian regimes can appear stable, until they aren’t. Türkiye’s Communists have built a system resilient to protests, insulated from foreign pressure, and propped up by technocratic control. But legitimacy is a fragile currency. And when students, those meant to inherit a regime’s future, publicly call for its end, it’s a signal that pressure is building, even if not yet visible in the streets of Ankara.

Whether these students can translate energy into organization, and organization into sustained opposition, remains to be seen. Yet the protests in Kraków have reverberated far beyond Poland’s borders, sparking conversations among Turkish diaspora communities in the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands. In cities like Berlin, Rotterdam, and New Jersey’s Little Istanbul, informal gatherings have begun to coalesce around a shared unease, a sense that the authoritarian drift in Ankara is not just a domestic tragedy but a global concern for Turks abroad.

For years, these communities maintained a cautious distance from overt political activity, wary of surveillance, family repercussions, or the simple fatigue of exile. But now, as an economic crisis grips Türkiye and the communist regime undertakes dramatic measures to enforce its rule, many are starting to recognize they must take a stance. Indeed, a new sense of urgency is taking root. The regime may still enjoy control at home, but abroad, the cracks in its narrative are growing louder.

 

[Jay]

The moment Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recited the now-infamous verses, "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets / The minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers", there was a pause in the square. Then the crowds erupted in cheers chanting "Down with the atheists and down with their regime." Today, Erdoğan has been sentenced to ten months in prison under Article 312/2 of the Turkish penal code for inciting religious hatred, though few believe the poem, first penned by pan-Turkish nationalist Ziya Gökalp, is what truly frightened the ruling government.

What Erdoğan did was remind the nation that religion still lives here, in the alleys of Konya, in the factories of Kayseri, and in the memories of a country now being reshaped by a Worker's Party that promised justice, but is delivering something else entirely.

Three years into its tenure, the Turkish Workers’ Party is no longer the movement it once claimed to be. The party came to power on a wave of syndicalist organizing and post-military disillusionment, an urban workers’ revolt born of a decade of failed interventions abroad and a crumbling domestic order. But revolutions, even those ignited in the name of justice, are rarely gentle with dissent. The Worker's Party has outlawed opposition parties, first the Islamist-leaning Welfare Party, then the nationalist MHP, and is now shuttering hundreds of mosques and religious schools under a sweeping "secularization initiative" that critics say is indistinguishable from soft cultural erasure. In its place, the Workers' Party has promoted an Islamic Socialism palatable to their apprehension of backwards materialistic entrapments.

The crackdown is no longer limited to institutional religion. Clerics are being imprisoned for "counter-revolutionary behavior." A recent directive prohibits gatherings of more than twenty people at any religious site not sanctioned by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. There are whispers that the Ministry has decreed that the Friday sermons must now be pre-approved by the Cultural Affairs Officers who roam the countryside.

In this atmosphere, Erdoğan’s poem was less an act of rebellion than a cry of memory. That it drew such a swift and harsh response says more about the state’s fears than his intentions.

The Workers’ Party is beginning to look less like a governing body and more like a monolith, ideologically rigid, increasingly paranoid, and deeply indebted. The same trade syndicates that swept them into power now demand state subsidies to sustain faltering industries. Foreign capital has vanished, inflation has surged, and basic goods like flour, meat, and gasoline are under threat of being rationed in major cities. Yet the party continues to expand its state apparatus, recently establishing the “Security Directorate,” which functions as neighborhood informant offices.

The Republican People’s Party (CHP), once the heart of Kemalist secularism, has largely failed to mount resistance. Its aging chairman, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, has remained publicly neutral on the banning of rival parties and the growing suppression of religious expression. Behind closed doors, party insiders whisper of a rebellion brewing within CHP ranks, led by a younger generation eager to reclaim the party's moral footing. But for now, the CHP stands awkwardly complicit, neither embracing the revolution nor opposing its excesses.

Erdoğan and what remains of the Welfare Party now seem to be the only real opposition movement still inside the country. It is a role that sits uneasily with the secular left, many of whom once decried his blend of political Islam and market liberalism. But in a country where all other dissent has been silenced or fled, his voice, even from a prison cell, resonates. Erdoğan’s message is not fundamentally Islamist, nor is it nostalgic. It is, at its core, about space, cultural, spiritual, and political, for an identity that the Workers' Party insists must be eradicated in the name of progress.

What’s unfolding now in Türkiye is not simply a power struggle between left and right. It is a deeper reckoning with the nature of revolution itself. Can a revolution built on the promise of equality tolerate difference? Can it coexist with tradition? Or does it, by necessity, consume everything in its path, including the very people it once claimed to speak for?

Erdoğan’s sentence is meant to send a message. But if the Workers' Party believes that prison will silence him, they may be misreading the moment. Outside the courthouse, protesters chanted the first lines of the poem as riot police stood in formation. It is not that the people are ready to overthrow the government, not yet. But there is something shifting beneath the surface. The silence of the last three years is beginning to crack. And if history has taught Türkiye anything, it is that the sound that comes after silence is rarely quiet.

 

[Jay]

The Opposition That Chose to Fold: How Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu Made Peace With Power While Democracy Collapsed​

For a time, it was fashionable to believe that Türkiye’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) would outlive every crisis. It was, after all, the party of Atatürk, the party of the Republic itself. But political immortality, it turns out, is not the same as relevance. And under Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the CHP became something else entirely: a party that survived by ceasing to matter.

Last month, Kılıçdaroğlu resigned from the party leadership under pressure from reformists and what remains of civil society. In any other era, his departure might have sparked reflection. Instead, it has revealed a truth too long ignored: the CHP, long seen as the last institutional counterweight to authoritarian drift, has not been an opposition party in any meaningful sense. It has been a collaborator. One that legitimized the rise of the Workers’ Party’s revolutionary regime by providing the illusion of pluralism while retreating from every moment that called for courage.

In the three years since the Workers’ Party came to power, the CHP struck a posture of principled moderation. But moderation, untethered from resistance, became complicity. Islamist and nationalist parties were banned outright. Dissenters purged. Media shuttered. The constitution rewritten in practice if not yet in text. And through it all, the CHP stayed. It stayed in parliament. It stayed in televised debates. It stayed in state-coordinated elections. It gave cover to a system whose sole function was to preserve power behind the facade of choice.

To call this a failure of leadership is too kind. Kılıçdaroğlu’s tenure will be remembered not as a final act of resistance, but as a slow surrender. He was not deposed by tanks or mobs. He was undone by his own passivity.

Now, as the Workers’ Party accelerates its transformation of Türkiye into a one-party state, complete with loyalty laws, ideological tribunals, and surveillance architecture, we are told the CHP has a new leader who offers something different.

Ayşe Çiller is everything Kılıçdaroğlu wasn’t. Where he dithered, she plans. Where he mollified, she challenges. She is a lawyer, economist, and one of the few figures in Turkish politics whose personal biography reflects the necessary understanding to help Türkiye overcome its challenges.

Unlike her predecessor, Çiller is not content to be the regime’s designated loser. She speaks openly of institutional reform, minority protections, and economic modernization. She rejects both the crony-statism of the ruling alliance and the rigid secularism of the old guard. Hers is a politics of memory and movement, not managerialism.

Still, Çiller’s rise matters. Not just because she offers a plausible blueprint for democratic renewal, but because her existence threatens the central fiction of the regime: that there is no alternative. In her person, and in the grassroots coalition she has quietly built over the past few years, there is a flicker of pluralism the Workers’ Party cannot easily absorb or destroy.

Prime Minister Eda Yıldırım has staked her regime’s credibility on revolution. Her speeches invoke “unfinished liberation,” promising to remake Türkiye’s soul through collectivization, ideological re-education, and surveillance justified by class war. It is a vision that is Stalinist in form if not in name. And it is held together not by consent, but by exhaustion.

But even revolutions must pretend. The illusion of parliamentary procedure has been critical to the regime’s survival, especially as it courts cautious support from governments in Europe and Asia. The CHP, in its neutered state, gave the Workers’ Party that illusion. Now, with Çiller threatening to make the opposition real, that illusion may soon be discarded.

For too long, foreign analysts comforted themselves with the thought that Türkiye’s democratic institutions were durable, even self-correcting. That they would bend, but not break. That some residual Kemalist hardware, constitutional courts, independent military officers, secular education, would constrain authoritarian ambition. But those assumptions now feel like relics of a different world.

Türkiye today is not in transition. It is not in crisis. It is in consolidation. The question we fear is that not whether democracy will return. It is whether it will be remembered. There will be many who write about this moment. They will ask how the Republic, so proud of its secular traditions and pluralist façade, yielded so easily to a party that promised purification over compromise. And they will ask why the party of Atatürk chose survival over struggle.

Kılıçdaroğlu may be remembered by some as a steady hand in turbulent times. But in truth, he leaves behind a party hollowed out by fear, discredited by cooperation, and unable to defend itself against the very revolution it once believed it could contain.

It is Ayşe Çiller, not Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who embodies what remains of democratic hope in Türkiye. But she inherits a battlefield, not a platform. And whether she is crushed, exiled, or able to mount a true resistance will tell us much more about the fate of the Turkish republic than any speech or election ever could.

 

[Jay]

As August 30th arrives once again, Türkiye marks Victory Day (Zafer Bayramı), a date etched deeply in the nation’s psyche as the commemoration of triumph over foreign occupation and existential threat. It was on this day in 1922 that the Turkish forces, under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s visionary leadership, delivered the decisive blow at the Battle of Dumlupınar, sealing the fate of occupying armies and ensuring the survival of the Turkish Republic.

Victory Day is more than a military anniversary; it embodies a collective memory of resilience against overwhelming odds and a bitter, often overlooked history of suffering of the Turkish people. The war for independence came on the heels of brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns and forced expulsions, where Turks, like many others in the region, endured violent displacement, caught in the crossfire of a collapsing empire and nationalist fervor. The collective trauma of loss and survival has, for generations, shaped Turkish identity, creating a steadfast attachment to sovereignty, national unity, and the secular, democratic ideals Atatürk enshrined.

Yet, in 2006, Victory Day’s celebrations have taken on a more complex and perhaps unsettling hue. The iconic military parades, once unifying spectacles of national pride, now reveal the fraught and fevered role the Turkish Armed Forces continue to play in the country’s political landscape. The shadow of the army’s historical interventionism looms large, reminding Turks that the military is not just a defender of borders but a decisive player in domestic power struggles.

This tension crystallized ahead of this year’s parade, when the Turkish Armed Forces released a rare and pointed statement targeting the Socialist Republic of Thailand and, indirectly, Turkey’s own government. The statement accused Thailand of meddling after its Foreign Minister Surakiart Sathirathai allegedly raised fears of a possible military coup in Turkey during discussions with Prime Minister Eda Yildiz.

The message was clear that the Turkish military remains fiercely loyal to Kemalist principles: national unity, secularism, and sovereignty, and will not tolerate foreign interference or internal threats to its vision of the Republic. The statement also echoed a grim historical warning about previous communist-backed attempts to destabilize Turkey, underscoring the military’s readiness to confront any challenge, foreign or domestic.

Compounding the unease was a controversial video that surfaced from the Turkish Cadet Academy, showing cadets brandishing swords toward an effigy of Prime Minister Yildiz while chanting a menacing slogan. The Prime Minister swiftly condemned the act and vowed to prosecute those responsible, emphasizing that such gestures undermine both civilian authority and military discipline.

For many Turks, these incidents raise a disquieting question: Is the new war of independence one of ideals and external enemies, or an internal struggle over Turkey’s soul and future? As the nation honors Atatürk’s legacy, who saved the Republic from disintegration nearly a century ago, it grapples with whether history’s cycle is repeating in a modern guise.

The Turkish Armed Forces occupy a unique and paradoxical place in the Republic’s history and political fabric. Born from the crucible of the War of Independence, it was the army that preserved the territorial and political integrity of a fledgling nation-state amid foreign invasion and internal chaos. From its inception, the military has not only been a defender against external threats but also a self-appointed guardian of the Republic’s founding principles: Kemalism, secularism, and national unity.


However, this role has been fraught with controversy. Throughout the 20th century, the Turkish military intervened in politics on multiple occasions, staging coups in 1960, 1971, 1980, and exerting intense influence over civilian governments during the “post-modern coup” of 1997. For many Turks, these interventions were double-edged. On one hand, they prevented authoritarian drift and preserved secular democracy; on the other, they disrupted democratic processes, curtailed civil liberties, and entrenched military dominance over civilian affairs.

This ambivalence continues to shape how Turkish society views the army today. To some, the Turkish Armed Forces remains the last bulwark against creeping authoritarianism and ideological erosion, a corrective force that ensures the Republic stays true to Atatürk’s vision. To others, the military is an outdated institution, overly politicized and resistant to democratic accountability, whose interventions have perpetuated instability and hindered the maturation of civilian governance.

The current landscape, however, presents a critical inflection point. Following the government embarking on sweeping purges targeting the military’s upper and middle echelons, decimating its leadership cadre. Thousands of officers were removed under accusations of disloyalty or ties to what Ankara labels as counter-revolutionary or subversive elements. This purge not only weakened the traditional military hierarchy but also shifted the criteria for officer selection toward political loyalty and allegiance to the ruling party rather than merit or professional military standards.

This evolution poses profound challenges to the army’s institutional integrity and its ability to act as an independent guardian of the Republic. It raises pressing questions, Can the Turkish military maintain its role as a stabilizing force when its autonomy is eroding? Does the politicization of its leadership undermine the military’s operational effectiveness and its historic legitimacy?

Perhaps most striking is the army’s conspicuous silence in the face of these purges. Unlike its past posture of direct political intervention, the TSK has refrained from responding to the removal of its senior commanders, decisions that fundamentally reshape its command and influence. The recent veiled threat issued by the Thai government, insinuating an imminent military coup in Turkey, and the Turkish military’s robust but measured response also highlight this tension. The statement reasserts the military’s resolve to defend national sovereignty but simultaneously reveals a force constrained by political realities.

This restraint fuels widespread speculation, why does the Turkish Armed Forces, once a formidable political actor, now remain passive amid what many perceive as an existential threat to its independence? The answer may lie in the profound transformations within Turkey’s civil-military relations, where the military’s traditional power is being deliberately curtailed by civilian authorities seeking to consolidate control. It also reflects a complex calculus by the military leadership. Attempting to balance loyalty to the Republic and Atatürk’s legacy against the risks of confrontation with a government that now holds overwhelming political and legal authority.

Victory Day remains a powerful reminder that Turkey’s freedom came at a steep price, through hardship, displacement, and sacrifice. But this year, it also serves as a mirror reflecting the tensions within a country still defining what it means to be free, sovereign, and democratic in an uncertain and turbulent era.

As the Turkish flags wave and the military drums beat, the question hangs will the spirit of 1922 inspire unity and peace, or herald another chapter of confrontation within the Republic?

 

[Jay]

There’s a quiet rebellion happening in Türkiye and no, it’s not on the streets or in the parliament. It’s happening in the marble-floored, fluorescent-lit halls of the Turkish Central Bank, where Governor Hafize Gaye Erkan just pulled off something that feels halfway between a technocratic intervention and a monetary mutiny.

This morning, in a move that stunned markets and sent shockwaves through Beştepe’s increasingly ideological bureaucracy, the Central Bank announced it would liquidate $24.1 billion in foreign reserves, lower the reserve requirement ratio for banks by 3.5%, and begin a strategic injection of liquidity into a shrinking Turkish economy. On paper, it looks like a standard macroeconomic maneuver a blend of debt service and emergency liquidity provisioning. But in Türkiye’s current political climate, it reads like a declaration of war.

To understand why this matters, you have to zoom out.

Türkiye’s ruling government, a hardline Marxist-Leninist administration, has been pushing what can only be described as an economic hallucination: a full-scale tokenization of the Turkish economy, where traditional money is replaced by labor tokens, essentially collectivist IOUs tied to hours worked, rather than capital earned. This is not a metaphor. The regime believes markets are bourgeois relics, and it’s been trying to recode the entire financial system to reflect that vision.

Banks have been coerced. Capital controls have been threatened. State-run media have accused private enterprise of hoarding. In this world, money isn’t just a medium of exchange, it is becoming a battleground of ideology as the communist regime takes on all semblance of the Turkish ancien regime.

And that’s what makes Hafize’s move so radical. Because make no mistake, this was a break, not a bend. In the quiet language of central banking, the release of dollars to defend the lira and support the debt-burdened commercial sector is a statement of defiance. It says: “This is still a market economy. And we’re going to act like it, whether the regime likes it or not.”

Predictably, the Prime Minister’s Office condemned the move, accusing the Central Bank of “collaborating with the bourgeoisie” and “sabotaging the people’s economy.” A senior aide told state news agency TRT that the regime is “exploring all available means to expunge the measure and restore the authority of labor-backed economics.”

Translated from ideological double-speak: they’re trying to figure out how to stop the bleeding without admitting they’ve slashed an artery.

What’s striking, though, is the public’s muted response. The Turkish markets reacted only mildly to the announcement. The lira ticked up slightly in offshore trading. Domestic equities saw a flicker of optimism and then retreated. In a normal economy, a $24 billion reserve deployment would be a cannon blast. In Türkiye today, it’s barely a cough. That’s not a reflection of the policy, it’s a reflection of trust. Or more accurately, the lack of it.

For months, Governor Hafize has walked a knife’s edge between professional expertise and political survival. Many in Türkiye’s financial circles have whispered that the Central Bank lost its independence long ago. The delay in taking this measure, waiting until sovereign debt service had nearly overtaken annual GDP, only reinforced that suspicion.

But this week’s move has changed the conversation. The Turkish business community, from the Anatolian Tigers to coastal conglomerates, has quietly thrown its support behind the Central Bank. One executive told me bluntly: “It’s not enough. But at least someone’s trying to put out the fire, instead of blaming the thermometer.”

And let’s not be naïve, this isn’t over. The regime isn’t going to accept a return to monetary orthodoxy without a fight. If Hafize is seen as challenging the system too directly, she won’t just be ousted, she could be criminalized. This is Türkiye’s great paradox right now, the person trying to stabilize the economy may have to destroy her career to do it.

Still, in a regime obsessed with ideology, this move reintroduces a forgotten word into Turkish economic life: credibility. It’s fragile, and maybe too late. But for the first time in months, there’s a flicker of it in the air.

In geopolitics, we often talk about countries being at a crossroads. But sometimes, the more accurate metaphor is a knife’s edge, and Türkiye is balanced right on one. On one side, economic gravity and on the other, ideological gravity. Hafize’s move today didn’t change that dynamic but it may have given the country a few more steps to walk before the fall.

Because in the end, a country can run out of reserves. But it can’t survive running out of trust.

 

[Jay]

General Veysel Kurt​

General Arda Yılmaz​

Admiral Erden Zaimoglu​

For the third time in eighty-three years, tanks have rolled into Ankara, not as part of a national celebration, but to unseat a sitting government. The Turkish Armed Forces, or at least a decisive faction within it, have taken control of the state apparatus in what appears to be a well-coordinated, rapid seizure of power led by middle and senior-ranked officers. This was not a dramatic standoff. No sprawling street protests. No prolonged media spectacle. Just the sudden, almost clinical collapse of the civilian government in the early hours of December 8.

The General Staff of the Turkish Armed Forces issued a statement at dawn recognizing the newly formed Milli Güvenlik Konseyi (National Security Council), composed of key military figures including General Veysel Kurt, General Arda Yılmaz, and Admiral Erden Zaimoğlu. Notably absent from the new leadership was any senior figure from the Turkish Air Force, a silence that hints at lingering factional divides within the military’s chain of command. The symbolism was not lost on analysts that coups may be about control, but they are also about coalitions, and this one may have fractures beneath the surface.

The justification was familiar. The NSC cited the “systemic erosion of democratic institutions under the guise of revolutionary transformation,” a reference to the now-dissolved government led by President Ayşa Arslan and her TİP coalition. The council promised a swift restoration of civilian rule, “free and fair elections within three months”, and cast itself in the role of reluctant guardian. But Turkish history has taught its citizens that the promise of temporary military rule has a tendency to linger far beyond its stated expiration date.

We’ve seen this film before. In 1960, it was the breakdown of parliamentary norms that invited the military’s “intervention.” In 1980, it was the specter of ideological violence and the collapse of the state’s monopoly on force.

Each coup came wrapped in the same language of necessity: restoring order, protecting the Republic, saving democracy by suspending it. Each was followed by prison sentences, purges, and a redrawing of the country’s political terrain.

The 2006 coup follows a now-familiar arc, but also breaks new ground. For one, this was a coup not by the General Staff, but with it. Multiple sources suggest the initial planning and execution came from a younger cohort of field commanders including generals, brigadiers and major generals, who viewed the ruling TİP/PKK coalition and its affiliated Popular Revolutionary Guard Corps as an existential threat to the state’s secular and unitary foundations. It was only after the momentum had swung decisively that the senior echelon, including Chief of General Staff Musa Avsever, appeared to have acquiesced to support the coup.

President Arslan, detained after several hours of resistance, issued a brief address conceding authority to the military, perhaps the most conciliatory act of her troubled tenure. In it, she urged Turks “not to turn to violence,” and accepted responsibility for the regime’s direction. The broadcast cut off moments later.

Yet the country remains fragile. The now re-outlawed PKK has already vowed to “revive its struggle” in what it calls “the next stage of liberation,” and violence in Diyarbakır, Şırnak, and the rural Southeast has spiked since the initial announcement. The security services, now being consolidated under the NSC, are grappling with scattered resistance from PRGC holdouts and attempting to locate the GMT’s network of political prisons. As of Tuesday, the state of emergency remains in effect and martial law declared.

There’s another question: what does this mean for democracy in Türkiye? The NSC says it wants to “pave the road for a new civilian mandate, one that represents the full spectrum of the Turkish people.” But there are no civilians in the room. There is no transitional council composed of party leaders, no independent judiciary yet allowed to assert its relevance, and no roadmap that includes actors from across the political divide. It is, at present, a military government.

And yet, it does not feel like a return to the past, not entirely.

General Nuri İnönü, who appeared on state television Monday evening flanked by a deceptively plain red flag (representing Kemalism), invoked the legacy of the Republic’s founder not as a relic but as a “constitutional mission.” His speech, unusually reflective for a man who had just led a putsch, called on the TİP and PKK to lay down arms, offered clemency to former officials, and pledged not just elections, but a “full legal reckoning” for the previous regime’s abuses.

That’s a tall order. And democracy, fragile in the best of times, does not always survive under tutelage.

The real test will come not in the promises made this week, but in the decisions that follow: whether the NSC will tolerate dissent, whether it will step aside after elections or merely supervise them, and whether it sees its legitimacy as rooted in the people’s will or its own authority.

In Türkiye, as in much of the world today, the line between stability and stagnation has blurred. And as another republic emerges from the shadow of another coup, the question is not whether it will survive.

The question is whether it will heal.

 

[Jay]

It is not often that a country gets a second chance. It is rarer still when that second chance arrives in the form of a person.

This week, I sat down with Ayşe Çiller, the economist-turned-legal scholar now leading the Republican People's Party (CHP) into what may be Türkiye’s most consequential election since the transition to multiparty democracy in 1950.

In another era, Çiller’s elite credentials, Harvard and Columbia, might have invited accusations of detachment or aloofness. Today, they are the very foundation of her appeal.

Because in a nation that has veered wildly between ideological extreme, first the belligerent irredentism of the pan-Turkic nationalist government, and then a self-proclaimed utopian socialism of the TIP-PKK alliance, what Türkiye needs most is not a savior, but a systems thinker. It needs, in other words, someone who can think institutionally again.

To speak of Türkiye’s economy in 2007 is to speak of an edifice already burning. The numbers are grim. Public debt stands at $80 billion, nearly twenty times its current GDP. The lira continues to decline with inflation eating through wages. Inflation has so much of an issue that services are exchanged through foreign currencies as business leaders no longer trust their own currency. Unemployment, particularly among youth and recent graduates, is soaring. A brain drain has accelerated, leaving the country without its best talent.

But what strikes Çiller most, as she calmly laid out in our interview, is not the fiscal arithmetic. It is the psychological one. “The Turkish people no longer believe that rules matter,” she told me. “Because for nearly a decade, there were no rules only agendas.”

That decay of institutional confidence is perhaps the most damning legacy of Türkiye’s recent misadventures. When the socialist-led government abolished judicial independence, and the ultranationalist regime that followed suspended parliamentary authority in the name of wartime emergency, the Turkish Republic did not simply become authoritarian. It became structurally illegible.

No one could tell where power resided, or to whom officials were accountable. Vice Presidents overthrew Presidents, Prime Ministers ruled without Presidential oversight, and military councils operated outside of the command structure. The state functioned not as a referee, but as a participant, constantly changing the rules to suit the ideology du jour.

In response, Çiller has not promised revolution, but rectification. She speaks in the language of institutional integrity, of a Central Bank made fully autonomous, of budgetary oversight restored to the National Assembly, of constitutional authority rebuilt brick by brick. Her economic program is notable not for its radicalism, but its discipline.

She told me that if elected her government would focus on two main tasks. Addressing public debt and restoring Türkiye’s infrastrucutre. Center to this project is what she dubs the 'New Digital Green Deal', a new industrial policy that will jumpstart the Turkish economy.

And yet what truly distinguishes her is what one might call her moral economy. Çiller’s view of the state is neither neoliberal nor socialist, but what she calls “socially anchored market governance.” She does not fetishize the private sector; nor does she demonize it. Rather, she sees the market as a platform for productive cooperation so long as it is tethered to legal certainty, regulatory transparency, and social equity.

Her rhetorical style, too, offers a notable departure from Türkiye’s recent firebrands. She neither shouts nor scolds. She persuades. And in a political culture long shaped by volume and vengeance, persuasion is a lost art.

Of course, any serious discussion of Türkiye’s future must engage with its most fraught and enduring fault line: the Kurdish question. The recent surge in violence across the southeast following the military’s forcible ousting of the TIP-PKK coalition government has reawakened bitter memories for both Turks and Kurds. Civilian trust is eroded, especially as violence escalates. The southeast remains a zone of fear and uncertainty. Yet in Ayşe Çiller’s framing, there is a subtle but potentially transformative shift taking place, one that deserves attention.

“I want to be clear,” she said firmly during our interview, “The HDP and the PKK are not the same. And it is high time our political discourse began treating them accordingly.”

In a political environment that has demonized Kurdish parties for supporting the PKK and other insurgent movements, Çiller’s words are a direct challenge to the prevailing narrative.

“The Kurdish people are citizens of this Republic,” she told me. “They are not a question. They are not a security issue. They are part of our national community, and their issues are social issues. The same as the rest of ours.”

Çiller is acutely aware of the emotional terrain. “The Turkish public is understandably wary,” she acknowledged. “The blood spilled by the terror groups like the PKK has left scars on every part of this country. But precisely because of those sacrifices, we owe it to this nation not to accept endless war as our only future.”

Her proposed path forward is both firm and flexible. She calls for community reintegration programs for nonviolent sympathizers, educational parity and funding for Kurdish-majority provinces, and the legal expansion of linguistic and cultural rights, especially in municipal governance. In return, she expects and demands full participation in the democratic process by all actors who renounce violence.

And on the increasingly volatile question of Türkiye’s regional posture, particularly in Syria and Iraq, Çiller does not hide behind platitudes. “We will always prefer cooperation with our neighbors,” she said, “but let’s not pretend that the governments in Damascus or Baghdad are currently capable of stabilizing their own territories, let alone ours. If Türkiye must act unilaterally to neutralize cross-border threats, we will—but only after exhausting diplomacy.”

One that does not mistake silence for peace, or force for strategy. Çiller’s aim is not to erase conflict through denial, but to de-escalate it through design, to give Türkiye an off-ramp from permanent emergency, without surrendering the security of the state.

Equally complex is Türkiye’s ongoing struggle with religion and public life. After a decade in which secularism was first weaponized against faith, then hollowed out by religious exceptionalism, Çiller’s message is one of equilibrium.

“Laiklik must be a shield, not a sword,” she told me, rejecting both statist dogmatism and clerical overreach. She defends the right to religious expression, such as the right to wear the headscarf in public spaces, without ceding the state’s neutrality. She supports elective religious education, not mandatory indoctrination. And perhaps most radically in today’s Türkiye, she refuses to use religion as a campaign tool.

In this, Çiller may be channeling the more generous spirit of Atatürk, not the mythologized founder who ruled from above, but the civic republican who believed that the state must belong to all, or it belongs to none.

All of this, however, rests on a foundational uncertainty: will the military accept a return to civilian supremacy? When I posed this question, Çiller did not hesitate. “I am not asking the military to obey me,” she said. “I am asking them to obey the Constitution they claim to defend.”

She was not tight-lipped about her views on the military. She has promised to regain control of the national security council, currently led by generals, restore parliamentary control over defense budgeting, and reaffirm that the courts, not the army, are the guardians of democracy. The risk, of course, is immense. But her strategy is not confrontation, it is rooted in a deep belief that the country doesn't need self-proclaimed 'savoirs' but institutions.

And it may just work, because her political legitimacy does not come from an insurgent movement, a tribal coalition, or a cult of personality. It comes from the process. And in fragile democracies, that is the most powerful currency of all.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Ayşe Çiller why she returned to Turkish politics at all. After all, she could be lecturing at an Ivy League university, or serving on a World Bank panel, or simply living abroad. Her reply was quiet but firm: “Because no other country feels like home, not even Harvard in the fall.”

It was a reminder that patriotism, when unmoored from chauvinism, becomes something transformative. It becomes stewardship.

And in that sense Ayşe Çiller, who has kept her small lead in the polls, may be Türkiye’s first post-ideological leader, an architect, not an avatar.

 

[Jay]

After weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiations and growing speculation over her political direction, Ayşe Çiller, leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), announced late last night that she had secured a coalition agreement with the nationalist-center-right İYİ Party and a supply and confidence deal with the Greens, clearing a critical hurdle toward forming Türkiye’s next government.

The agreement, reached several days after President Abdullah Gül officially tasked Çiller with forming a government, brings an end to political uncertainty that had loomed since last month’s parliamentary elections, in which no party secured a majority in the 600-seat Grand National Assembly. The coalition, now composed of Çiller’s CHP (288 seats), Meral Akşener’s İYİ Party (19 seats), and supported by the Greens (7 seats) on a confidence-and-supply basis, gives the government a workable bloc of 314 MPs, just over the 301 needed for legislative control.

At a joint press conference with Akşener held at the Prime Ministry’s residence, Çiller affirme th promises she made on the campain trail. “The people have voted for change, for responsibility, and for a government that delivers, not just stability, but justice, prosperity, and recovery,” she said, flanked by party leaders and coalition negotiators. “We will form a government of responsibility. And we will govern for all of Türkiye.”

The agreement, described by aides as both “deliberate” and “delicately balanced,” includes a sweeping ₺30 billion commitment to public welfare spending over the next year, with key allocations toward housing, public healthcare, early education, and rural service expansion. It also proposes a reduction of ₺1.2 billion in defense spending, cost-saving measures of ₺35 billion, and the abolition of mandatory military conscription, and a reallocation of state investment toward industrial modernization and sustainable energy. In a nod to its Green partners, the agreement commits to phasing out coal subsidies by 2010 and adopting a national emissions ceiling law modeled on European standards.

Yet the pact is not a lurch to the left. It preserves many of İYİ's fiscal and national commitments, including stricter oversight of foreign investment in strategic industries, a pledge to keep the Central Bank operationally independent, and enhanced border security funding, a key demand from nationalist factions.

A senior CHP strategist called the final text “a blend of center-left social guarantees and center-right institutional sobriety aimed at restoring economic growth with a conscience.” The coalition’s guiding language places strong emphasis on GDP growth, youth employment, and export competitiveness, while also promising tax reforms to ease burdens on working and middle-class families.

But the road to last night’s agreement was far from smooth. Çiller’s leadership faced its most severe internal test in recent days, following leaked reports that she had met privately with Rıdvan Turan, leader of the far-left Socialist Democracy Party (SDP), in what was widely seen as an effort to widen her coalition. The rumors ignited fury within the CHP’s hardline Ulusalcı (ultranationalist-secularist) caucus, led by Emine Ülker Tarhan, a former judge and prominent defender of Türkiye’s Kemalist state legacy.

Tarhan and her allies threatened to bolt from the party entirely, potentially taking 88 MPs with them, if Çiller pursued formal negotiations with the socialist bloc. While the meeting with Turan was later confirmed to be informal and exploratory, the political damage had already been done. By Tuesday evening, CHP headquarters was under intense pressure to lock in a centrist coalition to avoid fracture.

According to sources familiar with the process, it was President Gül who, concerned about the growing political vacuum, invited Çiller to Çankaya and encouraged her to finalize talks with İYİ. That same evening, Çiller and Akşener met behind closed doors and agreed to seal the deal. Both women were pragmatic, despite coming from opposing sides of the Kemalist camp, and emerged with a working blueprint by midnight.

Interestingly, preliminary talks were held between the CHP and the Refah Party, which had come second in the election and whose presidential candidate, Abdullah Gül, won the presidential election. The concept of a grand coalition between coastal liberal reformists and Anatolian conservatives was briefly floated by political observers as a path to national healing.

Yet both flanks of the political spectrum resisted. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leading the Refah parliamentary group, made clear that his faction had “no interest in governing under secularist tutelage.” Likewise, CHP’s reformist base feared an erosion of liberal values in any alliance with Refah.

As one İYİ Party official described it, "it would have been an unstable coalition with two political ideologies that will likely be at odds at every turn, representing electorates that did not want to share the future.”

Nonetheless, political analysts agree that the coalition agreement between the CHP, Greens, and Good party was an outcome that represents a measured victory for democratic centrism.

“Türkiye has chosen dialogue over rupture,” said Dr. Levent Balcı, a constitutional law expert at Bilkent University. “But the next twelve months will determine whether that dialogue bears fruit or collapses under the weight of growing partisan suspicion.”

One of the clearest casualties of the coalition calculus was the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), whose 42-seat presence made it a tempting swing partner on paper. Çiller did meet with HDP leader Tuncer Bakırhan early in the process, according to two senior aides, and reportedly found “some alignment” on constitutional reform and decentralization. But opposition within both CHP’s nationalist wing and the İYİ Party to any arrangement with the HDP proved insurmountable.

With the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) having resumed its armed insurgency following the military’s ouster of the prior TIP/PKK-aligned government, even indirect cooperation with the HDP was seen by many as politically untenable. “There is no pathway to peace without coming to terms with the need to find a compromise,” Çiller reportedly told her party’s executive council after she faced pushback for the meeting.

The coalition’s slim margin of 314 seats in a 600-member chamber gives Çiller breathing room, but little more. With no supermajority, constitutional amendments will require cross-party negotiation. More immediately, the coalition’s longevity will depend on Çiller’s ability to maintain consensus between reformist social democrats, Kemalist nationalists, and environmentally minded progressives, each of whom harbors distinct priorities.

Yet, even with its ideological diversity, the coalition reflects a broader public desire for competence, clarity, and economic direction. After years of ideological polarization, violent unrest, and economic contraction, Çiller’s team enters government with a rare, if fragile, mandate to govern well.

She is expected to formally present her cabinet to President Gül tomorrow, after which a vote of confidence will be scheduled in parliament. In a brief statement, Çiller pledged “a return to seriousness, growth that includes everyone, and institutions that work for the people.”

Whether this government can last or merely outlast the moment may well define the next chapter of the Republic.